Wibke KOLBMANN
(ETH Library, Zurich, Switzerland)

Keywords: business model, change management, cross-organizational cooperation

Abstract:
Libraries are rethinking their business models given the changes in their environment due to digital transformation. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the digitalization of research collections and their integration in digital research infrastructures as a new field of activity within academic libraries based on challenges that ETH Library has experienced in current projects. Encouraged by an audit in 2011 by the ETH Board, the supreme governing body of ETH Zurich, the executive board of ETH Zurich decided in November 2014 on the “Strategy 2015 to 2020 for ETH Zurich’s collections and archives”. The strategy focuses on providing funding for the digital transformation of collections and archives, especially those of the departments and ETH Library is responsible for coordinating it. Due to ETH Library being ETH Zurich’s competence center for digitization, metadata management, long-term archiving and innovative digital forms of presentation it is intended to combine the disciplinary know-how of the collection owners in the departments, with the information science know-how of ETH Library and to allocate the necessary resources within the library to ensure sustainability of services. Together with the natural history collections – the herbaria, the entomological collection, the fungarium and the xylotheque, four digitization projects have been established. Furthermore, ETH Library seeks to implement and maintain a corporate digital infrastructure for the natural history collections of ETH Zurich including services for digital collections and digital asset management and a discovery portal. It will be presented what kind of measures were taken to enter a new phase of cross-organizational cooperation of the university library with the academia.

Relevance for the conference: Sustaining digital visual heritage is a challenging task in which academic libraries can support research by providing the necessary organizational and technical infrastructure.
Relevance for the session: Libraries can play an important role in the preservation and maintenance of project-financed digitization work.